While other freshmen scrambled to class during the first few fall days at San Francisco’s Lick-Wilmerding High School, their classmate, 13-yearold classical cellist Nathan Chan focused calmly on the activity at a New York City recording studio. Chan had been asked by soul singer Roberta Flack-famous for her 1970s chart-topping hit “Killing Me Softly”-to record on her upcoming album Roberta Flack: Beatles Tribute. During the sessions, Flack dropped by the studio to catch Chan recording the string part to “I Will,” a tender ballad from the Beatles’ White Album. “She’s a really cool person when you talk to her,” he says. “She’s really laid-back.”

After three hours and about 20 takes, Chan wrapped up the session but stuck around to watch the editing process. “You always see it in the movies,” he says. “But after that experience, I now have a feeling of what it’s like to record in a nice studio.”

This isn’t the first time Chan and his 7/8-size 1780 Domenico Busan have been caught on tape. Flack extended the invitation after seeing his performance of Camille Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” on an HBO Family documentary called The Music in Me. For the Peabody Award-winning documentary, Chan and other talented young artists submitted home videotapes to HBO executives, who then had them flown into New York to perform at Carnegie Hall. Though that bit of limelight proved exhilarating, Chan’s most cherished memory isn’t of events onstage or even indoors: during a break at the photo shoot for publicity, Chan and the other musicians raised $100 at an impromptu jam on the street. His mother, Rena Ling, was cautiously supportive of the stunt. “Here he was playing his cello out on the street, and what if a car came by and splashed water on it?” Ling says. “He was going to play Carnegie Hall the next morning, and what if he had a soggy cello?”

Thankfully, his rare cello stayed dry and he was able to give that moving concert that later inspired Flack.

“He totally wiped me out,” Flack says of Chan’s performance. “I was totally blown away and impressed with his passion for the melody. As a teacher and a performer, I could tell he was being honest. I got goose bumps. He lives the song and experiences the whole thing.”

From his experiences on the HBO documentary and in the recording studio, Chan has gained a greater appreciation for classical music-he wishes his peers could feel the same passion. “Younger kids have the wrong mind-set about classical music,” he says. “Sometimes when a teacher puts on a classical-music CD, I hear people groan. I feel pity for them. They don’t appreciate it, but they should give it more of a chance.”

You could say Chan has been giving classical music a chance since he was in the womb. His mother is a concert pianist, Juilliard grad, and music teacher, and his father is a violinist with the Peninsula Symphony Orchestra. Just three years after he was born, Nathan made his musical debut conducting a set of Mozart variations with the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, a debut made possible when a conductor spotted the child air-conducting at one of his mother’s concerts. The next year, Chan conducted Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 with the Palo Alto Philharmonic.

“I remember standing on a chair that day because I was so short,” he says. “I didn’t really have any nervousness because I was doing what I was normally doing-except for the big orchestra. It wasn’t scary or anything. It was just kinda what I did.”

These days, Chan is performing on a full-size cello at Davies Symphony Hall with the prestigious San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, but he’s also inspiring his friends with a ferocious Jimi Hendrix-inspired version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” played on his SVC-200 Yamaha Silent Electric Cello.

Variety-it’s just kinda what he does.